Software development on iPadOS 26

I have been trying for a very long time to make the iPad work as a productivity device. I was never committed enough to glue it to a MacBook, but I tried. And I am not alone with this. On paper the iPad is an amazing device that should be able to be a daily driver for softward development. Yet iPadOS always got in the way. During the last WWDC Apple announced proper multitasking, so I obviously had to give it a try… again.

Some context before we jump in. I gave up on the iPad a long time ago. Apple made it clear they do not want me to use it the way I do. So my iPad is now sitting at home as a glorified ereader and YouTube device. This also means i do not update very often. Right now I am on a 2022 iPad Pro. And it is still working well, so no reason for a new one. I would actually go so far and say this is my last one if foldable iPhones are actually any good. So the only reason I am using beta software right now is that I could not care less if the device stops working for some time.

Let me get the bad, disappointing and very obvious news out of the way first: You will still not run your favourite IDE, an interpreter or a compiler on the iPad. Well, except for the already known ways with the exact same restrictions.

Now to the good news. If you are comfortable using the terminal to write software you will be in for a treat. And it does not have to be vim or Helix, it can also be a editor running in the environment it should.

As a test setup I wanted to use the peripherals of my ML / gaming system. A Alienware 34" OLED screen (3440x1440), a Keychron keyboard and an EndgameGear mouse. The keyboard and mouse are connected via a KVM where the desktop and a Caldigit TS4 dock are connected to. I do not have the screen running through the KVM, I manually change input ports. This setup worked well.

If I connect the currently stable OS or my phone to the Caldigit dock everything works as expected. If I connect the iPad with iPadOS 26 the mouse and keyboard suddenly stop working. Sometimes some input makes it through, but not usable or reliable. So I had to use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Not very pleasant but workable for a few weeks. The screen could be connected via the Caldigit dock. For me this would be a dealbreaker in the long run as I like the convenience of simply plugging a USB-C cable in my laptop and having a proper desktop setup.

Aside from the initial hardware issue multitasking works well. That is really all I can say about it, it works as expected. To me it was usable (but not pleasantly usable) when using the iPad as an iPad. I always switched to the regular interface. Thanks to a button in the command center it is easy to transition. I would wish this to happen automatically depending on external devices attached.

Liquid Glass is... well, taste is subjective. I personally do not like it. It makes the photo widget I cherish unusable, icons are hard to differentiate and it lags on my old iPad. I tried it for a day before turning it off. How well Liquid Glass was designed shows in the fact that Apple tuned it down multiple times over a few beta releases, so I would not consider this a me problem. With the glass interface turned off iPadOS 26 runs well on the old iPad. No lags, no stuttering and multitasking a terminal application, a browser window, Mail and Notes was no issue at all.

The iPad even worked as secondary screen. Who would have thought that a small MacBook can multitask well. If only you could put some software on this thing to make use of its power.

Some applications show the extra keyboard bar that gives you shortcuts to copy and paste text for example. This one appears on your main screen, so in my case the Alienware. These buttons are obscenely large on the external screen. Fonts in the terminal app also felt a bit off. But this is to be excepted that early in the beta, I assume once we have 26 released and people start using it we see software being updated.

Most other issues like the share sheet being messed up sometimes, the menu bar not showing properly when using fingers as input, Safari having individual tabs that stop reacting have all been fixed over the course of a few betas. So I would say the software itself is pretty stable.

I used this setup from beta1 until today. I wrote about 5000 lines of code on it and used it as my only development environment for a week. I used DrawIO and Notes to work on some design docs, answered emails, chatted with people, worked on office documents and watched some videos.

The only reason writing this much code worked for me was that I am already doing all my software development on a remote machine. And I only write code when I am at a desk, usually with the screen at a good height and external input devices. Nowadays you can make my life miserable by having me sleep on a wrinkled bedsheet, so I will not fold myself onto a couch anymore somewhere in Boston next to a British gentleman with a laptop propped up on my legs (hey Chris!).

Within its known limitations it was a great experience. But you fight iPadOS every step along the way for behaving like iPadOS. If this experiment did anything, it is making me more annoyed that we cannot get MacOS on the iPad, and I am not looking forward to iPadOS 26. That being said, I think that if your primary focus is video calls, editing documents in Google docs and ignoring emails because that is what Slack is for, the iPad finally lives up to its promise to be a productivity device.

Update 2025-08-28

With the latest iPadOS 26 beta Apple fixed the Caldigit dock and everything is now working as expected.